Kansei Engineering and Lifestyle QFD

In the old economy, companies decided what to make confident they could sell goods as fast as they could produce them; people often bought them largely based on price. In today’s consumer-driven economy, customer awareness of competitive options combined with demand for high quality goods and service has forced producers to shift from conventional 'product-out' thinking to a 'market-in' approach. This has lead to industry-wide adoption of quality management standards and practices, and is one reason why products manufactured in industrialized nations usually satisfy basic functionality, usability, quality and safety.

Kansei Engineering example: Mazda Miata; Kansei Workshop, www.qfdi.org; artwork by QFD Institute In the new information economy with its unprecedented globalization and environmental concerns, however, businesses are now challenged by:

How can a company maintain a competitive edge in a market filled with products of equally satisfying quality and functionality?
How can your new products be differentiated when they are quickly followed by low-priced clones?
In some product segments, consumers are making the purchasing decision more and more on psychological and emotional appeal. How can your product and brand connect emotionally with them?
How can engineers address the emotional design needs of new breeds of consumers who are highly informed, multi-cultural, and globally minded and represent a different purchasing decision process?

Kansei Engineering example: cosmetic packages, artwork by QFDI; Kansei Workshop www.qfdi.org These challenges in fact opens a new opportunity for generating greater sales and market share if you can successfully harness the unspoken emotional quality characteristics consumers seek in your product and service.

Kansei Engineering was created to address this emotional side of product development. It is a consumer-oriented emotional design and branding technology that attaches importance to customers' wants for emotional, sensory, and lifestyle-enhancing solutions with your product development, creating synergy for emotional branding.

QFD and Kansei Engineering

Boeing Dreamliner 787, Photo courtesy of Boeing, Kansei Engineering case study from the 16th Symposium on QFD QFD provides a disciplined framework for effectively merging this specialized method in your product and business process development process. Lifestyle QFD uses easily available Kansei Engineering tools and software to apply QFD, a proven, customer-oriented development method for product, business process, and quality, to an emerging area of lifestyle, image, attitude, and psychological needs — the fuzzy emotional sides of product development which are the next "edge" for producing highly profitable, differentiated products and services.

This Workshop will:

Introduce participants to the Kansei Engineering concepts, approaches, and market segment-oriented development of Kansei needs;
Show various case studies where Kansei Engineering was successfully used;
Explain the rarely revealed inner workings of the Kansei Engineering arithmetic;
Explain the relationship between QFD and Kansei Engineering;
Show Kansei software options that are available today and how to begin applying Kansei methods on your next project.

Participants will take part in a Kansei experiment in class.

Who should attend?

Anyone who is interested in design and development of a new product or service;
Decision makers involved in product strategy.

Prerequisites
None.

Instructor

The Kansei Engineering Workshop will be taught by Glenn Mazur.

Mr. Mazur is an international authority on QFD and leading Kansei practitioner/trainer in the U.S. who recently presented his work at the 1st International Kansei Engineering Conference in Japan. He is the executive director of the QFD Institute and International Council for QFD, and president of Japan Business Consultants. A Japanese quality specialist since 1980, he has studied and worked with Japanese quality masters, including Dr. Mitsuo Nagamachi, founder of Kansei Engineering, and Dr. Yoji Akao, founder of QFD. Fluent in Japanese, Mr. Mazur is one of a few Westerners who can articulate often too foreign and inexplicable oriental concepts with intelligibility appreciated by English-speaking audience.

Mr. Mazur is a recipient of the 1998 Akao Prize^® for Excellence and one of the only two non-Japanese to be certified as QFD Red Belt^®by Dr. Yoji Akao. He has taught Total Quality Management at the University of Michigan School of Engineering for 10 years, delivered many keynotes at international conferences, written over a hundred articles and papers on QFD and quality methodologies, and trained numerous QFD Green Belts^® and QFD Black Belts^®worldwide since 2000.

Inquiry

Please contact the QFD Institute or TEL: +1 734-995-0847 (Monday - Friday 8:30 am - 5:00 pm U.S. Eastern Time).

QFD Gold Belt^®, QFD Green Belt^®, QFD Black Belt^®, QFD Red Belt^®, and Blitz QFD^® are registered marks of the QFD Institute.